Resetting The Waste Ink Counter On Epson L120

 

Whether you are an expat or not you should be printing your sensitive documents on you own equipment not at the print shop local or the Internet cafe. I found the best value to be the Epson L120 ink tank printer. It cost me 4900PHP years ago and has functioned flawlessly and cost me next to nothing to operate over the years. 

Then I started receiving the troubling notice that the waste ink pad was near end of life.

In searching for a solution for this I ran across and lot of information that did not help me and a few malicious websites that were trying to pass off trojans as counter resetting software.

There may be a way to reset an L120 manually, but until I can find it I have a great little free tool called the Epson Adjustment Program from Nosware.  

There are some sites out there purporting to offer this software when what they are actually distributing is some kind of malicious program. One site presented the files in a .rar and when I attempted to scan the compressed package at VirusTotal it could not see into the individual files. I was curious and dumb enough to download it anyway. I then opened it and uploaded the individual files to VirusTotal. It turned out to be some kind of porn trojan. 

The files at Nosware come in a .zip and they are virus free. But do not take my word for it. Scan them yourself by whatever means you are comfortable with.

When you get the zip open extract it, click the .exe and then click on "particular adjustment mode":

On the next page select "waste ink pad counter" and click ok:

I reset my counter before I thought of making this post, so that is why it is at only 120 (below). 

To check the level of your counter tick "main pad counter" and click "check":

When you are ready to reset the counter tick "main pad counter" again and click "initialize"

Click ok on the resulting dialogue box:

The next dialogue box will instruct you to turn off the printer, so do that and then click ok:

You will get a final dialogue box telling you to reboot the printer and after you do that you will see that the counter is now 0%:

There is still one very important task. You now have to replace the ink pad. I reset my counter before doing that because I had an emergency print job and it is not like a few more jobs will make a difference. 

It's not like the waste ink is sloshing around in there (you will see what I mean when you open up your printer).

You should be able to find a new ink pad at either Shopee or Lazada for about 200PHP and that includes the delivery charge. 

This will get messy so do have paper towels on hand. The ink will soak through them too if you are not careful, especially when  you remove the pad from its plastic enclosure.

There are instructions on the net for the L120 that show a little window on the back of the printer that can be opened. That does not apply to the L120s made in the Philippines (at least not the one I have).

You will see a screw on the back of the printer near the center at the bottom:

I put that screw in the pad enclosure after removing it so the screw would not get lost:

To extract the enclosure, make sure the bottom is supported and then remove the screw.

With your hand on the bottom of the enclosure gently push to the right and it should pull right out.

You can feel around the bottom of the enclosure to get a grip on it to gently pull it down after shifting it to the right.

This is the bottom of the printer with the enclosure already removed and the red arrow indicates the right hand direction:

The new and old pads side by side:

A perfect fit:

Slap it back in, slide it to the left, replace the screw and the printer should work like new.

Mine did.